KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2018

Building and maintaining streamlined continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines is often challenging. It is even harder on Kubernetes since the deployments are, rightfully so, safely guarded by the API Server of the cluster. Organizations tend to lockdown the API Server, restricting the ability to use an external CI tool. Using external CI tools thus comes at a cost of security, access, and ease-of-use.
Nearmap dealt with these challenges using intrinsic Kubernetes principles. We use CircleCI, Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and a custom Kubernetes controller to achieve a declarative configuration approach to continuous deployment. In this talk, we discuss the challenges faced, provide an in-depth analysis of our declarative CI/CD approach and how Nearmap is enabling self-managed continuous deployments of Kubernetes clusters.